2 Corinthians 5 fits in many ways with the concerns of the re-made spiritual body of 1 Corinthains 15. So here is our text for today:
1 For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 For in this tent we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling? 3 if indeed, when we have taken it off we will not be found naked. 4 For while we are still in this tent, we groan under our burden, because we wish not to be unclothed but to be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. 5 He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.
Here Paul contrasts our present bodily, earthly existence with a future existence that is reconstituted by a heavenly body. That body is not made with hands; that is, it is made with God’s hands — eternal etc..
Our time in our present earthly existence is a time of yearning for the completion of that heavenly body.
That future body is not the undoing of this one, its total dissolution, but the putting on of an eternal body of the earthly body.
The expression “in the heavens” needs some brief attention: Paul says that if we our earthly tent (body) is destroyed, we have another one. That body is a building of God, an non-hand made eternal house in the heavens. It does not say that we will conduct our eternal life in the heavens exactly, though it could mean that; it says instead that we have a body for us in the heavens that will be put on over what we have now. That kind of existence could be in heaven or it could be a heavenly embodiment on this earth, even if it is a new heavens and a new earth.